Frienships are like ice, they may thaw but the water that creates them can always be refrozen

Uh...It was icy here yesterday?? Really? I had no idea. Honestly. I didn't leave the house. In fact, don't tell anyone, but I never even really got dressed. I didn't even manage to put a bra on. I took a muscle relaxer around 11 am and lazied my way around the house all day clad in blue pajama pants, a Longhorn sweatshirt and warm, fuzzy socks.

I managed to wash a comforter, and a load of laundry, and pick up a tiny bit from my friends coming over Saturday night, but that's it. All day.

I did finish the book I was reading. The Kite Runner. Wow! Terrific book, and I absolutely recommend it. My best friend from childhood sent it to me as part of my Christmas present with a little yellow post-it note saying it was her favorite book of the year. She was right. At least to February 20th it is definitely my favorite book of 2006...It's about a boy who grows up in Afghanistan in the 70's, and how his life was so dramatically altered by the Russian war and then the Taliban. Although, by the time the Taliban came in, he and his father were in the states. It is also, and more importantly, about the friendship of a lifetime, and what it truly means to be a friend. The sacrifice and love that true friends show each other, and how hard it can be to be that kind of friend.

The importance of my friend sending this book to me didn't hit me until I had finished it. The friendship in this book is one separated by lifestyles, cultures and distance. In many ways just like my friendship with her. We have known each other for 21 year now, and while we have always been friends, there was a period where our friendship was tested by the distance that has surrounded it since I moved away in the second grade. I always realized exactly how important her friendship was to me, but there was a period in college where I think it had faded for her. When we were reunited before she joined the peace corp, she told me one day that she didn't realize how much she had missed me. And then at her bachelorette party, she again reiterated those sentiments, as our friendship was rekindled by a long weekend of restorative hanging out. But our friendship is not based upon the same things as so many of my friendships. It is based on the knowledge of a person as a child. The memories of learning to write together, of shooing away her younger brother, who in many ways feels like my younger brother, of slumber parties, and basement games of Nintendo's Paperboy, and the distance that made our time together so much more important. The feeling of seeing the six year old you once knew in the woman sitting across the table from you. How our personalities are really just the same 21 years later. There is a kinship between us that no one else shares, and for that, I am blessed. For that, I know I will know her for the rest of my life, through everything life can throw at me, and at her.